Maren did not ease into the accelerated training.
The morning after the holding room, she was waiting in the herb garden before sunrise with the three old books and an expression that told me the gentle, building pace of the previous weeks was over. We were working with urgency now. The window Nessa had described sat over everything — a clock none of us could see but all of us could feel.
"Yesterday was uncontrolled," Maren said, without greeting. "Today we control it."
"Yesterday I couldn't even hold a selective suppression on Finn without bleeding—"
"Yesterday you suppressed seven Ashborne-bound simultaneously and differentiated them from twelve pack wolves in the same surge." She looked at me steadily. "The capability is not the question. The question is whether you can access it wi
